Life of a Chemo Patient

I think nobody, including myself, realised what could happen when my existing condition would start to mingle with the new one.

Let me bring you up to the latest first. Today is my first antibiotics free day (apart from the prophylaxis which will take another 18 days). It’s about time, as my stomach did have serious problems coping. Hopefully it will also help to lessen the fatigue.

The wounds have started to heal. For those of you courageous enough to watch the picture in my previous post, here a visual update. Once again, this is a very disturbing picture . When I saw the lower wound cleaned out like that I realized its magnitude (for those of you who did not watch the picture, it’s huge in width and about 1.5 cm deep) and that it will take months to heal.

However, nobody warned me about the fact that the neuropathy would come back. And I was too stupid to be aware of it whilst trying to cope with the concept of a number of extra holes in my body. But now I know. And it is hell. The vibration I have described time and again which is the core of my neuropathy now goes through the wounded leg, where the wounds’ borders are slowly getting their nerves’ reaction back into place. It really is like piping 2 tunes on 1 leg. Calf and foot are burning and vibrating constantly, at the same time it feels as if someone pours cooling liquid into the wounds, whereas my leg constantly reacts as if it is going into a continuous cramp. BTW, my right leg just burns and vibrates.

Luckily standing and walking are improving rapidly.

It influences everything I try to do, even sleeping is becoming a problem. In every way this situation has thrown me back for months. With the neuropathy now hitting back in full force (it must have felt awfully neglected for the last couple of weeks), it is not only my legs are being affected but also my head. My ears are slowly shutting down because of the mucous tissue being more and more upset by the continuous vibrations. It feels as if someone is slowly squeezing the internal lining of my skull. But since my head also has to deal with the contradicting signals from my left leg, which I described earlier, the result is an enormous fatigue and it takes a major effort not to allow myself to submerge into a feeling of lethargy.

I certainly will come out of this but the accumulation of all that happened during the past 3.5 years demands digging deep.